Empires, Exceptions, And Anglo-Saxons: Race And Rule .

Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons1317Some of the erasures are by-products of the structure of historiography. Emergingfrom diplomatic history, the historiography of the U.S. empire has been notablystate-centered and nation-bounded, its inter-imperial history exploring the interactions between bounded states but not the ideas and practices they circulated, borrowed, and shared.7 New historiographies have added methodological breadth,especially toward social and cultural history, and widened the range of actors recognized as engaged in U.S. “foreign relations.” Recent works have done much to bringempire toward the center of U.S. history, providing rich and novel accounts of U.S.imperialism.8 But most nonetheless remain locked in metropole-colony dyads thatneglect inter-imperial dynamics and connections. Ironically, while the emergingstudy of U.S. colonialism draws on theoretical insights developed in the critical studyof other empires—notably postcolonial theory and history—the field has not yetexplored the interconnections between empires.9American Historical Review, 102 (June 1997), 769–74. Michael Adas, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon:Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History,” American HistoricalReview, 106 (Dec. 2001), 1692–1720; Serge Ricard, “The Exceptionalist Syndrome in U.S. Continental andOverseas Expansion,” in Reflections on American Exceptionalism, ed. David K. Adams and Cornelis A. van Minnen(Staffordshire, 1994), 73–82. On the intellectual roots of U.S. national exceptionalism, see Dorothy Ross, TheOrigins of American Social Science (Cambridge, Eng., 1991). On the relationship between transnational historyand exceptionalism, see Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review, 96 (Oct. 1991), 1031–55; Michael McGerr, “The Price of the ‘New Transnational History,’” ibid.,1056–67; Ian Tyrrell, “Ian Tyrrell Responds,” ibid., 1068–72; and Robert Gregg, Inside Out, Outside In: Essays inComparative History (New York, 1999), 1–26.7 On the historiography of U.S. foreign relations in this period, see Edward P. Crapol, “Coming to Terms withEmpire: The Historiography of Late Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History, 16 (Fall1992), 573–97; and Robert Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900 (Arlington Heights, 1986).8 Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (ChapelHill, 2001); Eileen Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920(Durham, 1999); Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the SpanishAmerican and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, 1998); Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events inFilipino History (Durham, 2000); Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage andNationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (Berkeley, 2001); Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, andRicardo D. Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the History of U.S.–Latin American Relations(Durham, 1998); Kelvin A. Santiago-Valles, “Subject People” and Colonial Discourses: Economic Transformation andSocial Disorder in Puerto Rico, 1898–1947 (Albany, 1994); Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in anAge of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill, 2000); Eileen Scully, “Taking the Low Road to Sino-U.S. Relations: ‘OpenDoor’ Expansionists and the Two China Markets,” Journal of American History, 82 (June 1995), 62–83; GervasioLuis García, “I Am the Other: Puerto Rico in the Eyes of North Americans, 1898,” ibid., 87 (June 2000), 39–64.9 On ways to integrate U.S. history into colonial studies, see the round table “Empires and Intimacies: Lessonsfrom (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History, 88 (Dec. 2001), 829–97. For inter-imperial histories, seeIan R. Tyrrell, Woman’s World / Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, 1991); Dirk Bönker, “Admiration, Enmity, and Cooperation: U.S. Navalism and theBritish and German Empires before the Great War,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2 (Spring 2001) ml (Jan. 14, 2002); Catherine Candy, “The InscrutableIrish-Indian Feminist Management of Anglo-American Hegemony, 1917–1947,” ibid. l (Jan. 14, 2002); S. B. Cook, Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth-Century Analogiesand Exchanges between India and Ireland (New Delhi, 1993); and Anne MacPherson, “Colonial Reform, ColonialHegemony: Gender and Labor in Belize and Puerto Rico, 1932–1945,” paper delivered at the “Pairing Empires:Britain and the United States, 1857–1947,” conference, Johns Hopkins University, Nov. 2000 (in Paul A. Kramer’spossession). For early attempts to situate U.S. imperialism in an international context, see Ernest R. May, AmericanImperialism: A Speculative Essay (New York, 1968), esp. chaps. 6–8; and Robin Winks, “American Imperialism inComparative Perspective,” in The Comparative Approach to American History, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New York,1968), 253–70. For a comparison within the U.S. empire, see Julian Go, “Chains of Empire, Projects of State: Political Education and U.S. Colonial Rule in Puerto Rico and the Philippines,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42 (April 2000), 333–62. On transnational U.S. historiography, see David Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond:Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” Journal of American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 965–75.

1318The Journal of American HistoryMarch 2002This essay is an effort to chart one of the most significant intercolonial connections:the complex invocations of the British Empire and of racial “Anglo-Saxonism” in theeffort to legitimate U.S. colonialism during and after 1898. It takes as its focus debatesregarding the Philippines, their annexation, conquest, and administration, partlybecause the British exerted influence in the Philippines and the surrounding region,partly because the Philippine annexation sparked debates over U.S. colonialism inwhich the British Empire was most commonly invoked. The first section argues that“Anglo-Saxon” racism developed as a self-conscious bond connecting Britons andAmericans in the late nineteenth century, forged on their violent imperial frontiersand solidifying at points of elite Anglo-American social and intellectual contact. During and after 1898, American and British advocates of U.S. overseas colonialismenlisted Anglo-Saxonism as a racial-exceptionalist argument, leveled against claims ofnational exceptionalism. The second section explores the tensions within, and challenges to, Anglo-Saxonist racial exceptionalism emerging in the United States amongnational-exceptionalist “anti-imperialist” critics of the Philippine-American War, whoopposed acquisition of overseas colonies but not all other forms of empire. Those tensions were exposed most sharply during the Anglo-Boer War, when many Americanscame to identify with the enemies of their would-be Anglo-Saxon racial kin. The thirdsection discusses the decline of the Anglo-Saxonist argument for colonialism and thetriumph of a national-exceptionalist colonialism more suited to changing geopolitics,the increasing “racial” diversity of the United States, and the political realities of thepostwar Philippines. It also describes the simultaneous development of intercolonialpolicy dialogues that ran counter to the national-exceptionalist discourse.10This story is only part of the broader story of Anglo-American connections, alongwith rapprochement, geopolitical rivalry, economic nationalism, wartime alliances,and decolonization. Aspects of the present essay, for example, were well explored byStuart Anderson in Race and Rapprochement, which foregrounds the role of AngloSaxonist racial ideology in organizing Anglo-American diplomatic and military cooperation at the turn of the century. Anderson’s goal was to revisit diplomatic-historicalquestions with the tools of intellectual and cultural history, to show that ideas such asAnglo-Saxonism mattered in American geopolitics.1110 In this essay the terms “anti-imperialism” and “anti-imperialist” appear in quotation marks because the making of those terms—and their proponents’ limited definition of empire as overseas territorial annexation—are critical to the story of the national-exceptionalist engagement with overseas colonialism. On Anglo-Saxonism andU.S. imperialism, see Anna Maria Martellone, “In the Name of Anglo-Saxondom, for Empire and for Democracy:The Anglo-American Discourse, 1880–1920,” in Reflections on American Exceptionalism, ed. Adams and van Minnen, 83–96. See also Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas, 1963), 310–38. For anearly attempt to describe American perceptions of the British Empire, see Peter Henry King, “The White Man’sBurden: British Imperialism and Its Lessons for America As Seen by American Publicists, from the Venezuela Crisisto the Boer War” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1959). On the need to connect the history ofthe U.S. colonial state in the Philippines with global and inter-imperial history, see Julian Go, “Global Perspectiveson the U.S. Colonial State in the Philippines,” in The U.S. Colonial State in the Philippines in Comparative Perspective, ed. Julian Go and Anne Foster (Durham, forthcoming); and Michael Adas, “Improving on the Civilizing Mission?: Assumptions of United States Exceptionalism in the Colonisation of the Philippines,” Itinerario, 22 (no. 4,1998), 44–66. On inter-imperial policy exchanges, see Paul A. Kramer, “The World’s Work: The Uses of EuropeanColonialism in the American Colonial Philippines,” paper delivered at the European Southeast Asian Studies Conference, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Sept. 2001 (in Kramer’s possession).11On Anglo-American diplomatic rapprochement, see Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: Englandand the United States, 1895–1914 (New York, 1968); R. G. Neale, Great Britain and United States Expansion,

Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons1319The present essay draws on the literature of Anglo-American connections butapproaches its themes from two different angles. First, it centers on the problem ofempire, rather than that of rapprochement, looking at how Anglo-Saxonism legitimated U.S. overseas colonialism rather than how it consolidated Anglo-Americanties. The enlistment of race in turn-of-the-century Anglo-American geopolitics, Iargue, involved not only recognizing racial identity and fashioning diplomatic cooperation from it but also debating the boundaries and characteristics of racial identitiesin relation to empire.Second, this essay revisits the role of racial ideology in the history of U.S. foreignpolicy with an eye to its historical dynamism, contextual dependence, political contingency, and internal tensions. In traditional accounts of race and rapprochement,for example, racial systems such as Anglo-Saxonism are stable, coherent, and consensual tools of foreign policy. This essay, by contrast, explores tensions within AngloSaxonist ideology and its dynamic construction and reconstruction in light of specifically colonial politics. If race mattered for empire, empire also mattered for race.While empire is often represented as a mere outlet for metropolitan racial tensions, ascreen onto which prior, homegrown racial anxieties are projected, a well-definedcrucible in which domestic racial identities are forged, none of those representationscan fully account for the imperial dynamics of race making. This essay argues thatboth U.S. debates over empire and forces at work in colonial settings had a decisiveimpact on American racial ideology itself. More broadly, it argues that histories ofU.S. race making, like histories of the United States in general, belong in a transnational frame from which they have long been isolated.121898–1900 (East Lansing, 1966); Alexander E. Campbell, Great Britain and the United States, 1895–1903 (London, 1960); Charles S. Campbell Jr., Anglo-American Understanding, 1898–1903 (Baltimore, 1957); and RichardHeathcote Heindel, The American Impact on Great Britain, 1898–1914 (Philadelphia, 1940), esp. chaps. 4–5. Oneconomic rivalry and the limits of rapprochement, see Edward P. Crapol, America for Americans: Economic Nationalism and Anglophobia in the Late Nineteenth Century (Westport, 1973); and Edward P. Crapol, “From Anglophobia to Fragile Rapprochement: Anglo-American Relations in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Confrontation andCooperation: Germany and the United States in the Era of World War I, 1900–1924, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schröder(Providence, 1993), 13–32. Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895–1904 (Rutherford, 1981).12 On racial ideology and the making of U.S. foreign policy, see Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy(New Haven, 1987); Hazel M. McFerson, The Racial Dimensions of American Overseas Colonial Policy (Westport,1997); and Rubin Francis Weston, Racism in U.S. Imperialism: The Influence of Racial Assumptions on AmericanForeign Policy, 1893–1946 (Columbia, S.C., 1972). On empire, race, and popular culture, see Robert Rydell, Allthe World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago, 1984). On thepolitical dynamism of race, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the1960s to the 1990s (New York, 1994), esp. chaps. 1–5; Thomas C. Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-Making, and theWriting of History,” American Historical Review, 100 (Feb. 1995), 1–20; Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race inAmerican History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. MorganKousser and James M. McPherson (New York, 1982), 143–78; Ann Laura Stoler, “Racial Histories and TheirRegimes of Truth,” Political Power and Social Theory, 11 (1997), 183–206; Virginia R. Domínguez, “Implications:A Commentary on Stoler,” ibid., 207–16; David Roediger, “A Response to Stoler,” ibid., 217–18; Loïc J. D. Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination,” ibid., 221–34; Uday Singh Mehta, “The Essential Ambiguities ofRace and Racism,” ibid., 235–46; and Ann Laura Stoler, “On the Politics of Epistemologies,” ibid., 247–55. Onthe imperial dynamics of race making, see Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton, 1994). On the tensions of race within U.S. foreign policy and empire building, see GeraldHorne, “Race from Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and the General Crisis of ‘White Supremacy,’” Diplomatic History,23 (Summer 1999), 437–61; Harvey Neptune, “White Lies: Race and Sexuality in Occupied Trinidad,” Journal ofColonialism and Colonial History, 2 (Spring 2001) tml (Jan. 14, 2002); and Paul Kramer, “Making Concessions: Race and Empire Revisited at the Philippine Exposition,

1320The Journal of American HistoryMarch 2002Race Patriotism and Empire“England has suddenly become a guiding star to many of the American people,” the“anti-imperialist” J. W. Martin noted with dismay in 1900. “Conquest, extension ofterritory, subjugation of semi-barbarous peoples, establishment of a Roman peace—all these have been common in the British experience. But to the United States theyare fresh problems, perplexing and irritating, and already bringing battles in theirtrain.” The British Empire was not the only European empire that Americans imagined in seeking their place in the world in the late nineteenth century. Its predominance in American thinking was determined both by common language and deepand long-standing social and intellectual connections and by the vast, world-spanning scope of British commercial, naval, and colonial power. An empire with the sunperpetually over its shoulder could cast a long shadow across the imperial borders ofits rivals. Even the architects of empires with a far longer history of anti-Britishantagonism and far fewer ties of language and culture to Britain than the U.S. empirehad (such as the Spanish) set out in pursuit of the secrets of British imperial might.13But American enthusiasm for the British Empire often took a racial, Anglo-Saxonform that lent the weight of racial history and destiny to the controversial U.S.annexation of the Philippines. Anglo-Saxonism was, of course, far from the only racism to develop in the context of empire building. For the liberal English parliamentarian and political observer James Bryce, the aggressive, competitive racisms of thefin de siècle were themselves the product of geopolitical rivalries. Bryce wrote of the“race consciousness which the rivalry of other great races has produced, that . . . pridein the occupation and development of the earth’s surface which has grown with thekeener competition of recent years.” Others similarly identified dynamic, reciprocalconnections between race making and empire. John Fleming had noted in 1891 thatAnglo-Saxonism was merely the self-serving attempt by Great Britain to guarantee itshold on a fabricated “cousin” of increasing international power. “In proportion as theNorth American republic grows powerful and overshadowing,” he wrote, “grows theanxiety of Englishmen to have it understood that this potent factor in the world’saffairs is what they term Anglo-Saxon . . . in race, feeling, and literature.”14Anglo-Saxonism would reach the height of its explanatory power in foreign policyarenas in the years immediately after 1898, when it helped to cement an AngloAmerican accord and to provide a historical and political rationale for a U.S. overseasSt. Louis, 1901–5,” Radical History Review, 73 (Winter 1999), 74–114. For transnational histories of race see, forexample, Virginia Domínguez, “Exporting U.S. Concepts of Race: Are There Limits to the U.S. Model?,” SocialResearch, 65 (Summer 1998), 369–99; Martha Hodes, “Mutable Racial Identities in the 19th-Century U.S. andBritish Caribbean,” paper delivered at the “Pairing Empires” conference; and Carl Nightingale, “The World Travels of Racial Urbanism (Or, Some New Ways of Asking Whether American Ghettos Are Colonies),” ibid. See alsoPaul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Racial Politics in the American Colonial Philippines (forthcoming).13 J. W. Martin, English Lessons on Territorial Expansion (New York, 1902), 3; Josep Fradera, “Els principiosgenerales del arte de la colonización segons Joaquín Maldonado Macanaz: Idees victorianes en un context Hispánic” (The general principles of the art of colonization according to Joaquín Maldonado Macanaz: Victorianideas in a Hispanic context), Illes i Imperis (Barcelona) (no. 3, Spring 2000), 61–86.14 For James Bryce’s statement, see Philip Kennedy, “Race, Strategy, and American Imperialism in the Pacific,1895–1905,” Duquesne Review, 15 (no. 2, 1970), 259. John Fleming, “Are We Anglo-Saxons?,” North AmericanReview, 153 (Aug. 1891), 253.

Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons1321colonial empire in the Philippines and the Caribbean Sea. The Anglo-Saxonistdefense of U.S. overseas colonialism emerged from both England and the UnitedStates. The Liberal politician and future secretary of state for foreign affairs SirEdward Grey confirmed Bryce’s connections between empire building and race making when he hailed the Spanish-Cuban-American War: “the struggle in which theUnited States is engaged must be one to stir up our blood, and makes us conscious ofthe ties of language, origin, and race.” With the aid of British Anglo-Saxonists such asGrey, American colonialists folded the controversial annexations into deep structuresof history and destiny. “The entry of our country upon what appears to be a new policy of foreign conquest and colonization,” wrote Frederick Chapman, “must evidently impart a doubled impetus to that active extension of Anglo-Saxon civilizationfor which the mother country alone has been in modern times so conspicuous.”15As a discourse, Anglo-Saxonism was an echoing cavern of banalities out of whicheven a well-lit historian might never emerge. By the late nineteenth century, it was aracism built against a multitude of opponents on innumerable violent frontiers. British Anglo-Saxons had contended with Normans, colonized Celts, enslaved Africans,conquered Indians, and challenged Latins for world dominance. American AngloSaxons had defended African slavery, conquered Native Americans, confronted Latinempires, wrenched land away from Mexicans, and struggled to fend off waves ofimmigrants. Having begun as a British defense of the superiority of the AnglicanChurch and having early confronted Catholic “others”—the “Celtic” race in Irelandand the “Latin” in Spain—Anglo-Saxonism was closely allied to Protestantism andwas often said to share its virtues.1615 Edward Grey, quoted in Heindel, American Impact on Great Britain, 70; Frederick William Chapman, “TheChanged Significance of ‘Anglo-Saxon,’” Education, 20 (Feb. 1900), 364.16 On the history of Anglo-Saxonism through the mid-nineteenth century, see Reginald Horsman, Race andManifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); and J. R. Hall, “MidNineteenth-Century American Anglo-Saxonism: The Question of Language,” in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville, 1997). Anglo-Saxonism was a variant ofBritish and U.S. “whiteness.” On American “whiteness,” see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race andthe Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color:European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness:The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York, 1998); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of theWhite Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London, 1990); and Noel Ignatiev,How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995). Anglo-Saxonism was not shaped entirely within Britain and theUnited States but also by its critics, opponents, and rivals elsewhere. See, for example, Alan Pitt, “A ChangingAnglo-Saxon Myth: Its Development and Function in French Political Thought, 1860–1914,” French History, 14(June 2000), 150–73. On British racial ideology, especially regarding slavery, abolition, and colonialism, see Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore,1992); Antoinette Burton, Bu

Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons 1317 Some of the erasures are by-products of the structure of historiography. Emerging from diplomatic history, the historiography of the U.S. empire has been notably state-centered and nation-bounded, its inter